Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Company: OpenAI
Location: San Francisco
Posted on: March 27, 2025

Job Description:

The Research Platform Analytics team designs, builds, and operates the critical foundational data and analytics infrastructure that enables research at OpenAI.Our goal is one, and one only: accelerate the progress of research towards AGI. We do this by owning a variety of observability and analytics systems aimed at providing quality signals about our research, and own the entire lifecycle of it, starting with data production from training workloads, to ingestion, post-processing and end-user analytics products. All of this at large scale.About the RoleAs we scale up with more researchers and engineers joining OpenAI, we seek a pragmatic and passionate engineer with a strong focus on the experience for both engineers and scientists that work in our large data sets.Our work involves building a generic data processing platform that enables researchers to store, query, and process petabyte-scale datasets efficiently. This includes developing and maintaining large-scale stream and batch data pipelines, ensuring our infrastructure scales to support ML workloads, and making trade-offs to deliver impact quickly. We work across distributed data systems, infrastructure, and observability, ensuring reliability while moving fast.You will find yourself at home if you are comfortable with work such as scaling Kubernetes services, debugging Kafka consumer lag, diagnosing distributed systems failures, and developing new end-to-end data processing pipelines-from raw data capture to analytics using Presto, Trino, or Flink. A portion of this role involves hands-on infrastructure work, including deploying and troubleshooting core services.This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.In this role, you will:

• Build and maintain large-scale stream and batch processing pipelines (Kafka, Spark, Flink, Trino/Presto).
• Develop a general-purpose data processing platform for handling massive datasets.
• Scale applications for ML research, ensuring smooth operation as workloads grow.
• Ensure the security, integrity, and compliance of data according to industry and company standards.
• Ensure our analytics and data platforms can scale reliably to the next several orders of magnitude.
• Accelerate company productivity by empowering your fellow engineers, researchers, and teammates with excellent data tooling and systems, providing a best-in-case experience.
• Bring new features and capabilities to the world by partnering with product engineers, trust & safety and other teams to build the technical foundations.
• Like all other teams, we are responsible for the reliability of the systems we build. This includes an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed.You might thrive in this role if you have:
• Proficient in Python and backend development, with experience working in large codebases (monorepos).
• Experience building and operating large-scale stream and batch processing pipelines (Kafka, Spark, Flink, Presto/Trino).
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and deploying/troubleshooting production systems.
• Worked on access control, provenance, auditing, and large-scale data movement.
• Passion for building systems that provide key insights, especially in ML training workflows.
• Comfortable in a fast-moving environment, making trade-offs to deliver impact quickly.
• Understanding of data transformations in ML training and inference workflows is a plus.About OpenAIOpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
  #J-18808-Ljbffr

Keywords: OpenAI, San Francisco , Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure, IT / Software / Systems , San Francisco, California